Fletch, Too

“Absolutely!” Swooping the airplane through the sky in joy, Carr dipped the wings.

“No doubt about it!” Barbara was in the seat behind Carr.

Juma was beside her, trying to look out all the airplane’s windows at once. “Looks good!”

“Carr,” Fletch said, “I need to be set gently on the ground.”

“You mean, it’s true?” Her encased leg stuck out into the airplane’s aisle, Sheila had to shout from the rearmost seat. “There was another river?”

“Naam, Momma!” Juma shouted. “Indio!”

Everyone was shouting over the noise of the engine.

“Damn!” Carr swooped the plane lower for another horizontal look, this time from the west. “All the times I’ve flown over this area, and I never noticed. Damn me!”

“Soon,” Fletch said.

“That line of trees, all the way to the ocean, is distinctly different,” Barbara said.

“The whole line is indented,” Juma said. “You see? A different growth. Deeper in the ground. Greener, too.”

“Absolutely.” Looking through his side window, Carr was flying just above treetop level. “From this level, you can see the gap.”

“Carr…” Fletch moaned.

Juma, Barbara, and Fletch stayed at Kisite/Mpunguti one more night. It was late when they returned to the mainland. Juma said one did not start a long trek into the jungle an hour before sundown.

“Only superstition, of course”—Juma smiled—“but the ancient belief is that people might, just might, get lost in the jungle after dark, might just get hurt, might not be able to protect themselves so well from snakes, zebras, warthogs, cheetahs, and lions.” He lowered his head as if ashamed. “Just an ancient African superstition.”

“Then I guess I’m superstitious,” Barbara said.

“Anyway,” Juma said. “After eating so much we are too stupid and lazy-sick to do anything but trip around in circles until we fall down. We deserve to be snacked up by hyenas.”

At dawn they stood by the main road. An iced fish truck going to Mombasa took them part of the way. After walking an hour, an old Kenyan née English farm couple picked them up in a Land-Rover they said they had brought to Kenya thirty-six years before. It jounced along well. Juma knew when to start walking again through the bush.

They walked most of the way back to camp.

Early afternoon they found Carr and Sheila with a team of workmen setting up the corkscrew for another dig downriver. Sheila stumped around on her crutch, being as helpful as she could be. Clearly, though, from the expressions on their faces, the way they moved, Sheila’s frustration had grown, Carr’s patience had thinned.

That afternoon, in the steamy jungle, Sheila and Carr would have listened to any idea.

Sitting in the shade of a baobab, Barbara, Juma, and Fletch explained the possibility they had thought of, that sometime during the last two or three thousand years the river had changed course. They should look for signs of another river in the area, one that no longer existed, one that might have existed in times of the Roman Empire, upon the banks of which the Romans might have built their city …

Hearing the excited talk, the workmen worked themselves closer, then stopped, to listen.

After listening, Carr studied Sheila’s face. “What do you think, old dear?”

Sheila shrugged. “It’s possible, I suppose.”

“Do you suppose we could spot such a thing from the air?” Carr asked.

“Yes,” Barbara said firmly.

“Maybe,” said Fletch.

Wearily, Carr stood up. “I suppose it’s worth taking the plane up for a spin. I’m beginning to feel like an earthworm anyway.”

Making a chair by clasping their hands and wrists together, Fletch and Juma speeded the laughing Sheila up the riverbank, through the camp, to the airplane.

Having the idea the dry riverbed might be there, they spotted it almost immediately. A wandering, snakelike trail departed from the river five kilometers north of the camp to the right, the west, and wandered discernibly through the jungle on a longer course to the sea.

Following it, Carr pointed through the windshield and shouted to everyone. “You see? At some time in history, the river fell to lower ground, took a shorter course to the sea.”

“Water takes the course of least resistance,” Sheila piped up from the back, “unlike some reasonably intelligent people I know.”

Carr was taking them all for a spin in the airplane—literally. He followed the dry riverbed to the sea. He flew low, at treetop level along it, to the east of it. Swooping up and down, crossing back and forth, he was proving to himself and everyone that the dry riverbed was distinguishable from all heights, all angles.

Fletch was sick.

Quite suddenly, he found himself fighting not to vomit. Below them, the landscape was moving much too fast, tilting, coming and going. His vision blurred. His head pounded as if stuffed with rusty pistons in a rapidly accelerating engine. The back of his neck tightened to pain. As well as he could, he sucked huge amounts of air into his lungs.

A very different sort of sweat was on his face, the sort that made his skin feel distant to himself, and cold.

“Carr,” he groaned. “I think you’d better put me on the ground soon.”

“Look!” They were high in the air again. Barbara was pointing forward, so that Carr could see. “Look at that little hill.”

“Look at that!” Carr banged the heel of his right hand against the control panel. “Right where I figured! A lovely big mound on a bend at the west side of the river, how far from the sea?”

“Maybe ten kilometers,” Juma said.

“That much, you think?” Carr spun the plane around and down, down again to the large mound next to the dry riverbed. He flew over it and around it several times. “If there’s not a city under that hillock,” Carr said, “I’ll eat a zebra raw!”

Barbara said, “You just might.”

Carr was really showing what he could do with an airplane that afternoon.

When the airplane fell, Fletch’s stomach remained in the air. When the airplane rolled, Fletch felt his stomach was going to be splattered out through his sides. When the plane climbed, his stomach met itself just coming down with a lurch.

His head wanted to burrow into the soft earth below.

Getting into the airplane and taking off, Fletch had felt well enough.

Shortly after takeoff, he felt a stab of pain in his eyes. Afternoon sunlight reflecting from the windshield of another airplane, far away, seemed to cut right through his brain.

Breathing hard through lips that felt like sausages, Fletch knew he could not contain vomit much longer.

He grabbed Carr’s forearm. “Carr!” he shouted. “I’m sick! Really sick! Please put me down on the ground as soon as you can!”

“Tender tummy?” Carr examined Fletch’s face. “You’ve never complained of it before.” He rolled the plane into a left turn. “Hold on!”

Only to Fletch did the rest of the flight seem interminable.

He heard Carr say, “Hello. Look what the hyena dragged in.”

Fletch opened his eyes. The airplane was approaching the landing track leading uphill to the camp.

At the top of the track was parked a yellow airplane with green swooshes. The cockpit hatch was open.

A man in khaki shorts and shirt stood beside the plane, watching them land.

Fletch not only had the cockpit door open, but his seat belt off before Carr’s plane touched the ground.

While the plane was still taxiing, Fletch crawled out onto the wing. As soon as the plane slowed, he rolled off the wing onto the ground, which, thankfully, did not move.

Kneeling, Fletch vomited onto the ground.

The plane came to a complete stop fifteen meters up the track. Everyone was helloing and offering to help Sheila disembark.

Trying to keep his back to everyone, while trying not to kneel in his own vomit, trying to find new places to vomit, Fletch walked sideways on his bare knees across the track.

Behind him, near the airplane, there was much excited talk. He heard the name Walter Fletcher. The names Barbara, Juma. Happy, happy talk about the new hope of their finding the lost Roman city. Comments about Sheila’s broken leg and Juma’s heroism. Something about the Thorn Tree Café.

The voices were approaching Fletch.

He scraped his knees a little further along the dirt.

“And this,” he heard Carr say, standing over him, behind him, “is Irwin Maurice Fletcher. Bit under the weather at the moment, as you can see. ‘Fraid I did one too many loop-de-loops for him.”

Surveying the long trails of vomit and knee scrapes he had left across the track, Fletch wiped his nose and his lips and his chin with his hands.

Then, using his hands to push himself up from the ground, he stood up. His knees felt as if they had never worked, never bent, never clicked straight. They wobbled. His lower back felt like a rusty crane.

He took a deep breath.

He turned around.

Carr looking solid, arms akimbo, Sheila on her crutch, one foot off the ground, Juma smiling uncertainly, eyes dancing, Barbara dressed like a drugged Sunset Strip tart, hair dirty, sweat and dirt sworling on her skin, stood with a stranger among them, all looking at Fletch.

The stranger said, “He’s a pretty poor-lookin’ specimen, isn’t he?”

Everything below Fletch’s waist went numb.

He raised his face, for air. His eyes closed against a spinning sky.

When his knees hit the ground, the back of his neck snapped forward. His right shoulder was shot with pain as he landed badly on his arm, twisting it.